


Children of Hecate

by PseudoLeigha



Series: The Reasons Mary Potter Still Isn't Done (Works in Progress) [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Absentee mother, BAMF Lily Evans Potter, Dark!Lily, James and Sirius are the cutest co-parents, Lily essentially takes Sev's place at Hogwarts, NO SNAPE AU, No Boy Who Lived AU, No Prophecy AU, Serious!James, alternate hogwarts years, the kids are alright
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 09:21:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11399664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: This AU takes place in a world like Mary Potter, but where Eileen Prince left Tobias Snape and threw herself on the mercy of her family before moving to the continent and taking young Severus with her. Lily, James, and Sirius had a triad relationship for a while, and due to an unfortunate lapse of control on Beltane 1979, Lily ended up pregnant by both of them. Fraternal twins Victoria Anne (Potter-Black) Evans and James Henry (Black-Potter) Evans were born in early February of 1980. The prophecy Dumbledore received from Trelawney was not, in fact, anything to do with a boy born in July, but instead spoke of a 'great hero of wizards' who would be 'forced to yield in order to triumph.' It was not overheard by anyone. Dumbledore fulfilled it himself by appealing to the ICW to resolve the problems in Magical Britain when the Order finally sustained too many losses to keep going in the spring of 1982.





	1. End of an Era

**Author's Note:**

> The Peacekeepers descended upon the beleaguered nation with an efficiency which had not been seen on either side since 1978. They captured well over half of the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord himself. The ringleaders were deported to Nurmengard, to live out their lives like muggles. Many of the Second Circle were sent to Azkaban. Narcissa still managed to save her husband and a few of his closest associates with her well-planned Imperius Defense, though not so many as in 'canon' (ie, the background I wrote for Mary Potter).
> 
> Also unlike in canon, the Light was not exempt from the ICW War Crimes Tribunals. Dumbledore was ordered to step down from his position in the ICW for the actions he encouraged in the war, but he retained enough power to shield those whom he chose to protect. Lily was one of them. She had committed the most obvious and egregious crimes on the Light side of the battlefield. The others might have used the Killing Curse in the heat of the moment, and several of their healers had turned to ritual when their charms were not sufficient, but Lily had invoked a goddess and raised the dead on the battlefield. There were those who thought her too dangerous to live, with that kind of power to hand, and those who thought her blatant disregard for the Statute deserved punishment regardless of her reasons.
> 
> She threw herself on Dumbledore's mercy, much as Severus did in canon, and they negotiated a deal: her loyal service to him, personally, in exchange for his protection. So Dumbledore had stood as guarantor of her actions, and taken her off to Hogwarts. Her children were raised by Potter and Black, while Lily became the general factorum of the Castle in Severus' place. She officially teaches an elective in Healing, though her curriculum overlaps heavily with Potions and Charms, and the second term of every year is devoted to 'Preventative Measures' which is, more or less, Defense (though that position still takes its yearly sacrifice). Over the course of two years, she worked her way into Dumbledore's good graces and convinced him to revive the position of the Disciplinary Agent, which had been vacant since John McKinnon's retirement.
> 
> By 1986 she had more or less taken over the leadership of Slytherin House under the pretense of keeping the peace within the school. In 1989, this state of affairs was declared official, as Horace Slughorn finally retired and the replacement Potions professor was a former Hufflepuff. Lily was unanimously elected as the most Slytherin member of the staff, including the newly-hired Aurora Sinistra, who was actually an alumna of that House.
> 
> In 1991, Lily's children come to Hogwarts, and shenanigans ensue as they deal with firstie drama, coming to terms with their absentee mother's new presence in their lives, and the fact that there is, for some unspecified reason, an obstacle course in the dungeons which may or may not contain the fabled Philosopher's Stone. (As it turns out, the stone was never meant to be hidden from Voldemort in 'canon,' but from a near-legendary thief called the Shadow, whom Flamel had heard was targeting it.)

The sun rose unusually warm and bright for the first of September, illuminating first the tops of the trees that surrounded the small valley, then touching, ever so gently, the western slope, advancing slowly but inevitably across the ground until its progress was interrupted by the slate tiles and white-washed walls of a rather incongruously placed Welsh country house. It found the windows of a pair of bedrooms, as it did every morning, filtering through sheer curtains to shine brightly into the beds of two children and a dog in one, and a single man in the other.

The man was a violent sleeper. When the sun found him, he was inevitably locked in a slow but furious battle with serpentine sheets and blankets. He woke slowly, but completely, becoming aware of the light in his room and the discomfort of the sheets coiled around his limbs even before he opened his eyes, then his distinct need to use the loo, and the fact that his dark, perennially messy hair was uncomfortably greasy. The desire to take a shower inevitably led him to thinking about all the many things that needed doing on any particular day, and by the time he stretched and roused himself, he was ready and eager to get to work.

The children – a boy and a girl, eleven-year-old twins, both pale and thin, with chin-length, tangled black curls and sleeping expressions which belied the mischief of which they were capable when awake – had fallen asleep in the same bed (again), and now lay back to back, arms draped over their faces against the intrusion of the light. By habit they rose as late as they could get away with, the girl slow and reluctant to rise, but fully awake once she was on her feet, and her brother only too willing to roll over and go back to sleep every time he was startled into hateful consciousness by a sudden noise or change in the light. Normally it fell to the children's dad to drag them out of bed – often with the challenge of a race to claim the downstairs bathroom – but he was hardly more eager to rise than they, and all three of them had stayed up far too late the night before, discussing the adventure that was scheduled to begin that very morning. The twins had still been awake when the enormous black dog who was now curled up on the other bed with his head tucked into his side, similarly avoiding the sun, had come to check on them at midnight, and it had taken some time afterward for him to soothe their fears enough that they had fallen asleep.

Of all their parents, Sirius Black, otherwise known as 'Dad,' was their favorite. Their absent mother, Lily Evans, known only through letters and the occasional Christmas visit, was no competition at all. Their father, James Potter, might have given Dad a run for his money if he still acted like the mischievous teenager their dad told stories about, rather than the grown-up and responsible Senior Auror he had become. As it was, their dad was by far the most fun. He had been an auror, too, once, in the War, but when it ended, he had taken a job at a dueling gym, and then started working as a private dueling and defense tutor. He was the parent who taught them how to throw hexes and knives, took them exploring in Muggle London, and could make anything sound like an adventure, even chores. He was also the one who let Victoria plait daisies into his hair and played pirates with Jimmy, and the one who could be counted upon to reassure them that talking to snakes in the garden didn't make them evil (as their father's initial overreaction had implied) and that for all her faults, their mother was not some kind of horrid monster who would make their seven years at Hogwarts a misery.

That had been the subject of most of their discussion the night before, along with their concerns about what House they should try to get into. The two points were not entirely unrelated. All of their parents were in Gryffindor, but their mother was mildly infamous for (among other things) taking over the position of Head of Slytherin two years before. If everything they had heard about the four houses was true, Victoria was probably supposed to be a Gryffindor, and Jimmy a Slytherin. But Jimmy didn't like the idea of being sorted into their estranged mother's House, and Victoria didn't fancy seven years rooming with 'the Noble-minded and brave,' who sounded like total sticks in the mud, even if both Dad and Father claimed that Gryffindors had the most fun. And of course, neither of them could bear the thought of being separated from the other, and both were afraid that they wouldn't have a choice.

The sound of the shower on the other side of the wall from her brother's bed drew a groan from the half-conscious Victoria. "You should'a come to my bed," she yawned.

When Jimmy didn't respond, she pinched him. He yelped, scrambling away from her and falling onto the floor. Their dad popped back into human form at the disturbance, trying to leap to the defense of his son, but had obviously forgot where he had finally fallen asleep, and rolled _off_ the bed instead of out of it, which left him in the same position. They moaned and rubbed at their respective wounds, scowling identically. Victoria giggled.

Though it was a rather well-kept secret outside of the family which of them was the blood heir to which house (Potter or Black), she thought it was only too obvious that Father (James) was her sire, and Dad (Sirius) was Jimmy's.

"Not _funny_ , Vica!" her brother objected, recovering from his heinous injury well enough to throw himself back onto the bed and attack her in return. She squealed and attempted to escape, but their dad cut her off, falling on both children with a bear-like roar and tickling them until they were laughing too hard to breathe.

When they were incapacitated to his satisfaction, he stood with a self-satisfied smirk and bounded for the door.

The twins met each other's eyes for a split-second before realization struck: "He's headed for –" Victoria began as Jimmy shouted, "LOO! DAD!" They chased him down the stairs, but it was too late: the door to the second bathroom slammed just as they rounded the corner. His barking laugh followed them back down the corridor to the kitchen, where Azzie, the house elf of Brecon Dell Cottage, was pulling muffins from the oven.

She tutted when she saw them, shaking her head at their still-tousled selves. "Azzie sees young master and young mistress being too slow to beat Master Sirius to the bathing-room _again_ ," she teased them, shooing them through into the dining room and following with plates.

"He tickled us so bad we couldn't _move_ ," Victoria defended their early appearance.

"Yeah," Jimmy confirmed. "It wasn't _our_ fault!"

The elf gave them a skeptical look. "Is not being the young master and young mistress's fault ever, it seems." She counted off instances on her long, skinny fingers: "Bound to beds, clothes too small, windows charmed for to be dark… and this only in the past week."

Jimmy nodded fervently. "Definitely not our fault."

"And what about blue hair, stolen trousers, and all Master James' pants switched with ladies'?"

Both children giggled at the memory of their father trying to get dressed, and finding only lace and silk in his under-clothes drawer. "They just transfigured new trousers, and Dad liked the blue hair," Victoria defended their pranks.

Her brother nodded again. "And he even helped with the pants! _So_ not our fault!"

"What wasn't your fault?" their father asked, shrugging his outer robes off at the doorway and hanging them on a peg.

"Being so early to breakfast," Jimmy explained.

" _Again_ ," Victoria added.

Father laughed. "Sirius beat you to the loo again? Well, run and use the upstairs', and you can shower after breakfast."

"I'm first," Victoria called, but Jimmy was closer to the door, and he took off running, completely ignoring her complaints behind him. She shoved him when he re-emerged from the bathroom. "I _called_ it, twerp!"

"Since when does that matter?" he asked, elbowing her back. She tried to mess up his hair (even more – he hadn't brushed it), but he ducked away and laughed. "Hurry up, or I'll eat all the chocolate chips, too!" he threatened, heading back toward the stairs.

When breakfast and showers were finally accomplished, and the children's Hogwarts trunks triple-checked, charmed weightless, shrunken, and tucked in the appropriate pockets, the family of four took to the skies over their cleverly warded little valley for one last flight before heading to the train station. Jimmy and their father started whacking a Quaffle around with a pair of beater's bats, but Victoria preferred just flying without the complications of making it a sport. It helped her think and relax, and she needed that, today of all days.

"Sickle for your thoughts, poppet," her dad offered, swooping up to her after a few minutes. She took a moment to evaluate his expression before she answered. He looked a little concerned, and very sincere.

She sighed. "It's just…"

"Houses, still?" he guessed. "Or Lily? Or both?"

"Mostly Lily, I guess," she admitted. "I know you said she's not a bad person, and it's not all her fault she hasn't been around like, ever, and she'll make sure not to embarrass us, and treat us like anyone else, but…"

"But what, Vica?" There was a smile hovering around the edges of his serious expression. He never could keep a straight face very long.

"But what if she doesn't _like_ us – or what if we don't like _her_?!"

Sure enough, her dad smiled at that, and opened his arms to invite her into a mid-air hug. "Aw, Vic," he muttered into her hair. "She won't be able to help but love you. Even if she doesn't really know how to show it. And you'll get on with her just fine. It's a rare person that doesn't like Lily Evans."

"Father doesn't," Victoria pointed out, watching him grin as he only ever did when he was in the air, and bat the Quaffle back to Jimmy.

"That's because Lily broke his heart, poppet. He still loves her, you know, but the War was hard on all of us, and after it ended, well… things got even more complicated."

"You wanted Father and he wanted you, and Lily wanted to be a teacher?"

The wizard laughed. "More like I wanted James, James wanted to settle down and be one big happy family, and Lily… Lily didn't really get a whole lot of choice. She couldn't have stayed with us if she wanted to."

"You always _say_ that _,_ " Victoria complained, "but you never say _why_!"

"I know," he shrugged. "Your father and I decided when you and Jimmy were about three that we weren't going to tell you until you were old enough to understand."

The young witch pouted. She had heard _that_ before, too. The age they had decided on was thirteen, which wasn't for another two and a half years. "Maybe I'll just go ask _Lily_ , then," she challenged him.

The wizard grinned. "Make sure you get a photo of her face when you do."

" _Daaad_ ," she whined, but before she could try again to wheedle any more information about her mother from him, there was a sound like a klaxon from the house: the reminder that they had to be at the station in half an hour to catch the train.

"Go on, Vic. See if you can beat Jimmy back to the shed," he teased. She stuck her tongue out at him and dropped like a stone. Jimmy always beat her when they were running, but she was _much_ faster in the air.

"Come on!" she shouted as soon as she touched down, mocking the obsessive punctuality which had led Father to set the alarm-klaxon in the first place. "We're gonna be _late_." She laughed as first her father, then Jimmy and Dad joined her.

Jimmy was asking their dad about a certain school rule that he had been trying to get around ever since their letters had arrived: "So if we can get, say, a _second_ -year to hold onto them for us…"

Their dad laughed, even as their father groaned and muttered, "Not this again."

"Sure, kit. I'll send it to whoever you want – just make sure you pick someone who doesn't mind you constantly borrowing 'their' broom."

"Really, Pads?" Father asked, rolling his eyes.

Dad reached out to throw an arm around Father's shoulders, waving the other in his usual animated fashion. "C'mon, Jamie – don't you remember being eleven, off on your first real adventure, all excited to learn to be the greatest sorcerer since Merlin himself? Live a little!" He ended by ruffling Father's already-windswept hair.

Father rolled his eyes again, though he smiled nostalgically at Dad. "We'll discuss it and write you," he informed Jimmy.

"Bugger," he cursed. "That always means 'no!'"

"Not _always_ ," Father defended himself. "And watch your language!"

Everyone ignored the comment about the swearing, even Dad. "It kinda does, actually, Senior Auror Stuffy-Pants." (Father made a face at the name.) "But this conversation really _will_ have to wait, unless you scamps want to risk not having anywhere to sit…"

Victoria yelped. "Then what are we waiting for? Move it, boys!"

"Susan and Neville said they'd save us seats," Jimmy reminded her. "And you _know_ Madam Bones is always early to _everything_."

It was true that Madam Bones, the guardian of their best friends, was always early to everything, and she really didn't doubt that Susan would save her a seat, but… "Still, we _should_ get going…" Victoria started heading for the house, ignoring her brother's comment to the effect that they were _apparating_ , and so could leave five minutes before the train and still make it with time to spare.

They arrived just as the ten-minute warning whistle blew, a plume of purple smoke belching from the scarlet engine. Mrs. Weasley, an old friend of Father's, waved as she nudged the last of her sons onto the train and shouted something indistinguishable over the noise of the crowd. Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, the latter of whom was their dad's cousin, had obviously spotted them as well, but only sneered. Victoria nudged Jimmy and nodded in their direction. His eyes lit up with unholy glee and he gave their dad only the faintest warning tug on his sleeve before sprinting off to hug the pureblood ice queen around the middle.

"Cousin _Cissy_! How _are_ you, it's been _so long_!" he shouted, in an obvious, but no less effective, attempt to gain the attention of everyone within hearing range. Granted, that wasn't so far, with the train making all sorts of sounds and everyone talking at once, but enough people stopped and stared that Narcissa flushed beet red. She tried to subtly push him away, but he clung to her, ensuring that her dress robes would be wrinkled badly enough to require a straightening charm. "Aren't you glad to see your most _favorite_ nephew in the _whole world?_!" Jimmy enthused. His family tried with various degrees of success to hide their amusement. Dad was cracking up, and Father _snorted_ as he failed to hold in his laughter.

Victoria decided to get in on the action, skipping over as though she hadn't a care in the world. She made a proper curtsey to Lord Malfoy before throwing herself on Narcissa as well. "Hi, Cissy! Did darling Draco save us a seat? We have _so much_ to catch up on! We haven't seen him since the birthday party with the flying pudding fight, after all… Does Draco still want to be a werewolf one day?"

"No, Vica, you're thinking of Zabini. _Draco_ wants to be a _dragon_ when he grows up, isn't that right? He was telling us how he was _sure_ that would be his animagus form because dad's name is Sirius and he turns into a dog…"

" _Lucius_ ," Narcissa hissed, obviously trying not to look as panicked and horrified as she very clearly was. "Get them _off_ of me!"

The pureblood glared helplessly at them. "Unhand my wife, you hooligans!" he whisper-yelled, obviously trying not to make an even bigger scene.

"Un _hand_ her?" Jimmy shouted.

"But we've _missed_ her!" Victoria protested.

"What kind of sick man asks a couple of children to take off his wife's _hands_?!" Jimmy asked, with the appalled expression she knew he practiced in front of the mirror at home.

Lucius was now nearly as red as Narcissa, and clearly at as much of a loss. He seemed torn between drawing his wand and disapparating on the spot, leaving his increasingly angry wife to her own fate. Fortunately, Auror Potter seemed to realize that as well, because he came strolling out of the crowd at that moment, trailing his still-giggling best friend in his wake.

"James Henry! Victoria Anne! Say goodbye to your cousin, _now."_

Both Evans children knew better than to mess with their father when he pulled out that tone – the one Dad called the Voice of Command. By the time he added, "The train is going to leave without you if you don't hurry!" they had already let go of the furious witch, taken two steps back, and bowed in concert.

"Goodbye, Cousin Cissy," they recited obediently, in their most pleasant, socially-proper voices. They had been told on more than one occasion that this act was very disconcerting, so of course they had worked to perfect it over the years.

They were rewarded with matching Malfoy expressions of disbelief and confusion before they turned to hug their parents and make a run for the train, which was, indeed, making noises as though it was about to start moving. They scrambled aboard, lingering in the doorway to shout their love to the two wizards who had followed them more sedately across the platform.

"You've got your wands?" their father checked. They nodded. "Trunks?"

"Still shrunk," Jimmy said, patting his pocket as Victoria checked her own. She nodded.

"We haven't got time to un-shrink them and get them loaded now," Father muttered.

" _Relax_ , Jamie," their dad advised him. "Just put them at the end of your beds, guys. They'll un-shrink overnight."

"Or old Minnie will give them detention before classes even start for arriving out of uniform."

Dad made a _psht_ sound. "Fine, I'll call ahead and have Lily meet them in Hogsmeade and get everything where it needs to go. How's that? Everyone happy? Good? Good. Because you don't have a choice."

They really didn't, because the train was starting to move, and a prefect was standing behind the kids, urging them to close the door and find a seat.

"'Bye Dad! Goodbye Father! We'll miss you!" the twins chorused at the men who were now walking alongside the train.

"Us too," their dad shouted.

"Love you!" Father added.

Dad broke into a jog to keep up. "Write to us!"

"We will!" Victoria laughed.

"Tell us about your sorting!"

" _Daaad_ , you're _embarrassing us_!" Jimmy whined.

The man did a dramatic double-take at the hypocrisy of that complaint, given Jimmy's attack on the Malfoys, and promptly tripped over an abandoned trolley. The kids laughed as he rolled to his feet and glared at the offending vehicle, then waved. The last they saw of the station was their father approaching, shaking his head at his co-parent's slapstick antics, even as he waved as well. Then the train rounded a corner, and everything familiar was gone: Hogwarts, and their mother, were only eight short hours away.


	2. The Status Quo

Lily Evans was not the sort of person most people imagined when they thought of the Head of Slytherin.

Of course, most people probably still imagined Horace Slughorn, who had held the post from 1928 all the way through to 1989.

On the most superficial level, it would be difficult to find anyone who was less like Slughorn than the short, green-eyed red-head. She taught in practical healer's robes and sensibly low-heeled boots, and though she wasn't quite as slim anymore as she once was, no one had ever compared her to an overstuffed striped sofa. Her views on what it meant to be Slytherin and her political agenda were quite different from the old wizard's as well. Some of that was due to the fact that she was about fifty-five years younger than the former head of House, having just turned thirty-one. Some of it was almost certainly due to the fact that she had been a Gryffindor in school. Even more of it was likely due to the fact that she was muggle-raised, and had therefore fought for the Light in the War.

Not that she was a light _witch_. If anything, she considered herself Ambivalent: dedicated to both poles of magic equally… though she had admittedly made her reputation as more of a dark sorceress during and after the War. Slughorn's reputation, on the other hand, was as an apolitical facilitator of relationships and encourager of the advancement of the 'right' (richest and best-connected) people – an attitude which he had fostered in his Slytherins since he had taken over the House, and which had therefore shaped the entire nepotistic, graft-riddled organization that was the Ministry of Magic for well on half a century.

Unlike Slughorn, Lily thought that there was something hollow about trading on one's family name and flattering one's way into unearned authority. That was probably the muggleborn in her talking: no one knew more about pulling oneself up by one's boot-straps than a girl who had learned about Magical Britain when she was eleven, and spent the next ten years desperately trying to learn enough magic to keep herself and her friends alive in the middle of a war where her existence (and that of those like her) was the main source of contention. In her view, ambition was best served by Hufflepuff work ethic, Ravenclaw open-mindedness, and Gryffindor boldness. The world had seen how far deception and the pursuit of power had gotten her in 1982: chained to the prisoner's seat as the courts decided her fate. It was true that the deal she had struck to win free had been ruthless and cunning, but it had depended on charm, honesty, and good will and intent (and not a little bit of luck) to succeed, rather than carefully controlled, well-orchestrated plans and politics and blackmail, which was the popular interpretation of the 'Slytherin' approach.

Really, she didn't think there had been much to recommend her as Head of Slytherin, aside from the fact that nobody really doubted she could do the job. The same could not be said for the rest of the staff. Slughorn had rather let the House take care of itself in the last two decades of his tenure, the lazy old bastard. As might be expected when the students with the best connections make the rules with little to no adult oversight, the Death Eaters had found Slytherin House a prime recruiting ground, and it had been utter chaos after the social upheaval at the end of the War. Lily had begun the process of taming the Snake Pit from her previous position as the Inter-House Disciplinary Mediator, and when Slughorn finally elected to retire, her fellow staff members had obviously seen no reason that she should not continue to do so from a position of greater authority (her history and apparent general unsuitability notwithstanding). And the Hat _had_ confirmed her as a suitable candidate.

Dumbledore's eyes had twinkled madly when he introduced this decision at the ratification meeting of the Board, suggesting that the time had come for a change of pace, and assuring the shocked Board Members that she had his full confidence.

Of course she did. She was bound to his service by a magical contract, his _paramenein_ : a bond-slave, in essence. In exchange he stood as her _custos_ : guard, warden, and guarantor of her good behavior. Much as the terms under which she had proposed this arrangement and the subsequent stripping of her citizen status rankled, the arrangement itself was the only thing that had kept her out of Azkaban or Nurmengard when the International Confederation learned what she had done. If she served loyally and faithfully, making every effort to oblige him and proving her good will and reformed character, the War Crimes Tribunal had allowed that her _custos_ might petition to relax the terms of her sentence after twenty years from what more or less amounted to 'house arrest' to 'parole.'

Really, she had gotten off lightly: if they hadn't been in a state of war when she committed her 'crimes,' and her side hadn't won, she probably would have been chucked through the Veil for some of the stunts she had pulled. Well, if He Who Failed French had won, she probably would have been conscripted by the Death Eaters, actually, because _they_ weren't too timid to find a use for ritualists, but that was beside the point. In any case, she was very lucky to have avoided a prison sentence, even with the leniency shown to the Light warriors when they were brought before the Tribunal.

In the meanwhile, however, she now had to deal with the day-to-day and year-to-year minutia of running Slytherin, along with the scheming, spying, and manipulating necessary to keep the various factions within the House in check, and the usual stresses of teaching the Healing elective and acting as Dumbledore's girl Friday. At least she didn't have to deal with Inter-House issues, anymore: the job of Disciplinary Mediator had gone to Aurora Sinistra, the youngest member of the faculty and only Slytherin alumna, who had hired in the year before Lily was promoted.

Well, they _said_ it was a promotion.

Mostly it was a lot more absolutely thankless work. Two years had not been enough for the students to become accustomed to her way of doing things, and unfortunately, she didn't really expect it to get any easier for another year or three.

She collapsed onto a sofa in her (ridiculously verdant) Common Room, conjuring a glass for herself and filling it with a quick _aguamenti_. She had just finished the annual pre-move-in room-check, a process which involved breaking and removing all the illegal wards her students had placed on their rooms over the course of the previous year, examining the belongings they had left behind for contraband (which she confiscated for analysis and, in the case of the 20-year-old bottle of Irish muggle whisky hidden in James Warren's sock drawer, drinking), and leaving detention slips on the pillows of the worst offenders.

This was the third year in a row that a significant portion of the upperclassmen were returning to a month's detentions for trying to ward their Head of House out of their rooms along with the other students; stocking illegal potions, alcohol or muggle drugs (where Ananda Grey had managed to come across an entire envelope of LSD, Lily had no idea); having possession of restricted or banned literature and illegal ritual paraphernalia (Adelaide Pierce was a naughty girl indeed, bringing to school not only a ceremonial athame, but one finished with human bone instead of dragon or even goblin); and in one case, abandoning an unstable magical experiment with the potential to destroy half the dorms half-way through (Sherrinford Pierce, Adelaide's younger brother, and a Ravenclaw miss-sort if ever she had seen one).

One would hope that Slytherins were, in general, intelligent enough _not_ to leave blatantly illegal materials lying around when they _knew_ she was going to search their rooms, but they had youthful arrogance in common with her own former housemates, and somehow never suspected that their super-secret hiding spaces behind headboards and in the magically expanded and disillusioned hat-boxes shoved into the back of wardrobes would _ever_ be discovered.

 _Idiots_.

Still, it could be worse. She could be Head of Ravenclaw. Filius had asked for her assistance on more than one occasion, when it came to cleaning out _their_ dorms of a summer, and it was always a nightmare. She was constantly surprised that there had only one major, tower-damaging explosion from that House since the beginning of her tenure at the school.

She couldn't help but hope that her kids were sorted anywhere else, purely for their own safety.

Of course, she rather hoped that they would manage, against the odds, to both be sorted into her new clutch of Snakes. It would be for the best, for the sake of avoiding appearances of favoritism (and probably for their popularity), if they weren't, but she was selfish enough to want to see and interact with them as much as possible, since her movements outside of the Castle had been so limited throughout their childhood, and her contact with them even more so. Since her arrest at the end of the War, she had only seen them in person a handful of times, mostly over Christmas. (She would have preferred Yule or Samhain, of course, but given the nature of her crimes, she was _never_ allowed off the Grounds on those holidays, and even her participation in the students' observations was supervised.)

She was just considering whether Gryffindor or Hufflepuff would be better for Jimmy and Victoria, based on what she knew of them from their brief meetings, even briefer letters, and the reports Sirius had given her over the years, when the shrunken, enchanted mirror she wore as a locket pulsed with warmth against her skin. She answered it at once, enlarging it to the size of a compact, and opening it to see a pair of familiar, grinning, silver-grey eyes.

"Hey, Lils!" he said brightly, his tone immediately assuring her that nothing serious was wrong.

"Paddy! I was just thinking of you. Long time, no see," she smiled back. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Can't I just want to see your pretty face? Hear your dulcet tones?"

Lily chuckled. "Incorrigible as you are, you never call me just to flirt. What's up?"

"Well, you see, the thing is… we arrived to the train a bit late this morning, and didn't have a chance to get the kids' trunks un-shrunken and stowed away, so James and I were wondering," there was an incoherent mumble from somewhere outside the range of the detection charms, and Sirius corrected himself: "Fine, _I_ was wondering, if you might be able to meet the train and un-shrink the kids' trunks so they can get changed and Minnie won't give them a week's detention for showing up out of uniform."

Lily just blinked at him for a long moment. "Sirius Black, you are still the most irresponsible – how did you cut it _that close_?!"

He snorted. "We got there in plenty of time, but then Jimmy ran off and got side-tracked, and Vic decided to get in on the fun, and by the time James got his grown-up act together well enough to get the show back on the road, we were running rather late."

"And I suppose you were just an innocent bystander in all this," she suggested, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at the man.

He rolled his eyes. "Anything I could have done would have made it exponentially worse, believe me."

She sighed. "Fine. I'll get Dumbledore to let me go collect the firsties. Even he wouldn't force a mother to see her children for the first time in three years from the High Table at the Sorting, and he still owes me." She had missed her last scheduled visit due to an unfortunately timed time-turner accident, and because she couldn't even explain what she had been doing that was so important that she hadn't had the time for her own children, James had refused to re-schedule. He seemed to think it was better if she never saw them at all, rather than chance getting their hopes up and then having to disappoint them.

Then again, he also seemed to think it was better if they never had any interaction with her, period. He made a point of supervising their visits, and it was written all over him that he thought her a dangerous influence, and one which he wanted to keep as far from his children as possible.

Their break-up, in the wake of her trial, had been a nasty one. He hadn't known the half of what she had got up to working in the Safehouses. Oh, he had known about the _big_ things, the Major Workings she had done in front of everyone, to turn the tide of a battle when all hope seemed lost if she did nothing. But he hadn't known about the ritual healing or the bio-Alchemy or her correspondence grimoire and the reports she had exchanged with an Applied Metaphysics researcher at Miskatonic. He had known she had an interest in soul magic – he had given her access to the Potter-Peverell Library, for God's sake! – but he hadn't realized that she had been working on ways to _use_ that knowledge. The ICW Investigators had broken the cipher spells on her private journals, and thrown everything she had worked on since the age of fifteen in front of the courts, and her lovers: every detail of her self-experimentation with blood magic and runic casting; every twisted, terrible, beautiful corruption of healing charms she had crafted to kill; every thought on the Powers and the details of her relationships with them.

Sirius had understood, both her obsession with the most primal, most dangerous of magics, and why she had never mentioned it to him (the reformed scion of the Darkest house) or to James (who had always been of the Light, through and through).

James had not.

He could not find it in himself to maintain a relationship with a witch he considered dark, even though he had loved her since they were eleven years old. Even though she was the mother of his children.

When she had been stripped of her citizen status and rights as a legal entity, custody of her children had been turned over to their fathers: it was only through Sirius' intervention that James had been convinced to let her write, and see them at all, let alone to send them to Hogwarts. The terms of the latter accommodation had been that she communicate with them only by means he approved (only letters, which she was sure he read – she was fairly certain that he worried she would try to turn them against him if she was allowed to speak to them directly and privately, as with Sirius' mirror), and all visits were to be supervised at his convenience. He had to be terrified – not only were they out of his protection for the first time in years, but they were nearly within her reach, and he had built her up in his mind as being as evil as the Morrigan herself.

"Lily? Lily? Hellflower!"

"Huh?" she startled, brought out of her thoughts by Sirius's voice.

"Geez, Lils. You're a million miles away."

"Just thinking. Sorry."

"Yeah, well, I should get going. But call tonight and let us know where the kids end up." He was practically vibrating with excitement.

She laughed. "Of course. Should be around eleven – I have to lay down the law for Slytherin before I'll get any privacy."

"Sounds good. I'll be waiting!" She was sure he would. If she didn't call by eleven, he would probably call her at two minutes past.

Speaking of the time… "Gods and Powers, I need to be up in Dumbledore's office in five minutes. Later, Pads!" She leapt from the couch, headed for the Slytherin back-door that opened nearest to the Headmaster's tower.

"Go, go! And don't forget, about the –"

"Trunks, robes, un-shrinking. Yes, I'll take care of it, you irresponsible bastard! Say 'hi' to Jamie for me," she added sincerely. Their relationship had been less than cordial for years, but she couldn't really hold onto her resentment toward him and his visitation restrictions when she would soon be able to invite the kids to tea every weekend if she liked.

Sirius looked slightly startled, but he said, "Will do. _Ciao_ , _cara_!"

She snapped the case closed, shrinking it back to medallion-size as she reached the open corridors.

She was slightly out of breath, but exactly on time when she reached the statute that guarded Dumbledore's staircase. "Licorice wands," she panted, and it hopped aside to allow her access to the spiral stair. She took the precious seconds of its ascent to compose herself.

"Ah, Lily, my dear, do come in," the old man called before she could knock.

"Hello, Albus. You wanted to see me?"

"I did indeed! Sit down, dear girl. Oh, my – you look rather flushed. Are you quite alright? Would you like a lemon drop?"

Lily rolled her eyes. That was simply what six flights of stairs _did_ to a person. "No thank you. I'm fine, Albus. What's up?"

"Well, there are several matters I wished to discuss. First of all, I've reviewed the plan you proposed for your section of the Gauntlet protecting the stone." He looked over his spectacles with a disappointed little frown.

"And?" the witch prompted. The room she had proposed was ancient Palmyrene trap enchanted to produce multi-sensory illusions in response to the intent of anyone who entered it. It could project anything from an endless plane to a shifting labyrinth of hallways to a boggart-like simulation of one's greatest fears (though in that case the enchanting was far more complicated). So long as the intruder wished to advance, the illusions would befuddle them. As soon as they wished to retreat, the way back would become clear.

" _And_ , do you not feel that a Zenobian Box might be just a _little_ advanced for this particular venture?"

She didn't, particularly. The secret to defeating the trap was to disable the senses affected. In the version of the Box that she had proposed, the intruders would need to blind themselves and fly or levitate to find the edges of the space, as it projected the illusion of movement based on walking, the floor shifting with each step to bring one back to the same spot. After that it was a relatively simple matter of feeling one's way through the doorway to advance. Difficult, possibly slightly dangerous, depending on the spells the intruders used for levitation, but not _too_ advanced for most NEWT students to figure out, after a scouting trip and a few hours in the library.

"That depends. Do you still plan on actually hiding the Flamels' Stone at the end of it? Because if so, I'd say the Antlion Oasis is too _easy_ a variation."

"Lily, my dear, we've been over this. You were _there_ when Nicholas discussed his concerns about the stone's safety. The rumors that the Shadow is seeking it…"

"Yes, I know. And if it's true that the Shadow is a vampire, a Zenobian Box _might_ slow him? Her? Them, anyway, enough to be captured, but I still think you'd be best served letting me _implant_ it for you, or at the very least keeping it up here under a pile of wards."

" _Ah_ , but the Gauntlet is not only a challenge for the would-be thief. I seem to recall you enjoyed participating in it yourself your seventh year. And the true defense of the stone will not be the Gauntlet itself. _That_ will be a Carolline Concealment, secure from the average thief, and doubly so from the attempts of a vampire."

The witch sighed. A Carolline Concealment (hiding an object 'through the looking glass' – or rather, in a pocket-dimension tied to a mirror until certain conditions were met) was a very specifically targeted vanishing/conjuration enchantment triggered by an intent-based charm. Presumably the mirror itself would play a part in the intent-recognition, if it was doubly safe from vampires. "Very well. I still think that my sixth and seventh-years will be able to figure out the Box, though, with a bit of research. And some of them are bound to logic out what's happening. Perhaps you could assign each of us a year-level to challenge, and place them in order: use the Gauntlet to see which students are ahead of their peers, you know?"

The old wizard stroked his long beard. "Hmmm… do you know, I think that's an excellent idea. Very well. I shall look at the proposed challenges, and see what adjustments we might request. I hope you know you have just volunteered to assist with those adjustments, my dear." His eyes twinkled with mirth.

"Why Albus," Lily drawled. "When have I _ever_ declined to assist when requested?"

He chortled. "Quite so, quite so. Then. What else was there? You are prepared for the start of term?"

"Everything is ready for my first month of classes. The monitoring charms have been in place on Quirinus' chambers for weeks. I just finished the Slytherin room-checks…"

"Anything I ought to be aware of turn up in the room-checks?"

Lily sighed and handed over a list. She hated turning her students in for their illegal possessions, but not enough to risk taking the fall if Dumbledore realized she was protecting them. "I would appreciate it if you just let me leave it at confiscations and detentions," she said as blue eyes skimmed down the parchment. "They'll never come to respect me if they think I'm constantly running off and squealing on them to a higher authority," she pointed out, subtly reminding him that his end-game was a pacified Slytherin, not sending students to Azkaban for having possession of Class V non-tradable ritual materials.

"Have you given any more thought to the idea of an extra-curricular Practical Defense club?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

She winced slightly. But if that was the price of her autonomy within Slytherin… "I have twelve free hours a week, compared to the core professors, but I'd really like to keep at least half of those for dealing with emergencies and, you know, typical mayhem. I could knock together a general curriculum along the lines of Preventative Measures, but you _know_ I'm not much of a duelist… it may not end up being what you're looking for. And the logistics are a bit rubbish. I'd have to at least try to do a couple of sections so that everyone could attend at least one… maybe with multiple levels?"

"You were the one who wanted to try to find a way around that pesky Defense curse, Miss Evans," Dumbledore twinkled.

"I did at that," she admitted ruefully. Teach her to suggest good ideas. What did it get her? More work.

"I think three levels, with two sections each should suffice. I shall reserve the Great Hall for you during the hours of seven to nine, Monday through Saturday."

 _Damn._ So much for keeping a few free hours. She kept her disappointment from her face, though. "And Slytherin?"

"Oh, I think you've amply demonstrated your ability to make the correct judgments on enough decisions recently that I have no doubts about the management of your students and their adherence to the school rules. Though I _do_ expect all confiscated items to be disposed of properly and in a timely manner. And you will keep me apprised of the results of your inspections – annual and spot – as well as the punishments you hand out. I shall require reports, for the sake of accountability and precedent."

"I would expect _nothing_ less," she said drily, with a smile to take the sting out of it.

"Quite right," he chortled again. "The world does, after all, run on parchment. I shudder to think what I would do had I not a single report to read on a given day. My poor heart might not be able to stand the shock."

She snorted with laughter at that image. "And in World News today, the Supreme Mugwump has expired after an acute case of stress _relief_?"

"Indeed, indeed," the old man murmured, sobering. "But there is one last thing I wished to discuss, Lily."

"What is that, Albus?"

"Your… children," he said delicately.

Lily was certain the temperature in the room dropped five degrees as fear swept over her. What could he possibly want to say about her kids? And why would it warrant such a tone? "What about them?"

"If… well, if, that is, they are Sorted into Slytherin… I think it _might_ be best for Aurora to deal with any matters of discipline involving them, even if it is otherwise a strictly in-house matter. For the sake of avoiding any potential conflict of interest, you understand."

She did. For a moment, she had thought that he might be about to suggest that she could not have them in class when the time arrived, or associate with them outside of lessons. It was a great flood of relief that she stuttered, "Y-yes. Of course. That makes perfect sense. We should do the same for Draco Malfoy, too."

"Ah, yes… I had forgotten Narcissa named you his godmother."

To be honest, Lily forgot that most days as well. By 1981, Narcissa had been desperate to secure a future for her son in the event that the Light triumphed over the Dark Lord; when Lily had been captured in January of 1982, Narcissa had let her go in exchange for an Oath of Godparenthood. It clearly hadn't been her only back-up plan: the Malfoys had weathered the end of the War much better than Lily had, and in any case, she had played even less of a part in Draco's life than she had in her own children's, but it was still a potential conflict of interest.

"Do you want to tell Aurora, or shall I?"

"Oh, you may do so, if you happen to see her." He consulted a scrap of parchment on his desk. "Well, I do believe that concludes everything I had wished to discuss at the moment. We still have a little time before Rosalind arrives for my next meeting. If you'd like to stay and keep me company, I'll have biscuits sent up…"

"Well, perhaps just one," she grinned. "There is one other thing I was hoping to ask you. A favor, actually."

He finished calling an elf and ordering tea and pastries before he asked, "Oh? And what might that be, my dear?"

"Well…" she began, drawing out the word. "As you may recall, it's been several years since I've been able to see Jimmy and Victoria…"

"For which I am, for my part, terribly sorry, my dear," he offered, all false-sympathy.

She sighed. "It's not your fault James is a prat. But anyway, I was thinking… if it's not too much trouble, for the sake of the children, could I perhaps take Milton's place this year, bringing the firsties across the lake? I… I really think it would be better for them than having to sit through the Sorting and the Feast without even a chance to say hello."

"And for you, I dare say," the wizard suggested.

"Well… yes. It's been _three years_ , Albus. Please. I don't want them to think I don't care, sitting up at the high table and hardly sparing them a glance."

He shrugged. "I don't see the harm in it. But Lily, this must be a one-time exception. If you catch them breaking the rules or have them in class, or even in the Defense Club, you are to treat them just as you would any other student. Am I understood?"

"Perfectly, sir!" she assured him quickly. The tea arrived then, and she helped herself to a biscuit (lemon, of course), though she declined a cup. "I'll just let Milton know, shall I?"

Dumbledore chuckled, eyes twinkling merrily. "Yes, yes, I'll let you get off to it. See you at the Feast, my dear."

"See you then, Albus," she grinned.

Now all she had to do was wait the two and a half hours until she could reasonably take the Fleet across to Hogsmeade. She sighed. Well, perhaps she could figure out a basic syllabus for her Defense Club to help pass the time…


	3. The Beginning of a Beautiful Emnity

The trip to Hogwarts went by much more quickly than Jimmy or Victoria had expected. As Jimmy had predicted, Madam Bones had gotten her niece and her ward to the station early, and Susan and Neville had saved seats, as promised. After searching the train for their compartment (and greeting various acquaintances along the way), they had settled in and returned to the all-consuming question which every incoming first-year student faced: which house were they most likely to be sorted into?

When they had exhausted every possible iteration of 'probably Hufflepuff' (Susan and Neville) and 'it doesn't matter, as long as they don't separate us' (Jimmy and Victoria), they moved on to Exploding Snap, and then, after the lunch trolley passed, to the very serious business of trading chocolate frog cards. Susan really wanted Jimmy's Nimue to complete her Rare Witches set, but as far as he was concerned, she didn't have anything worth offering in exchange. She was still trying to convince him that Agrippa was at least as valuable when a girl with buck-teeth and very frizzy brown hair peeked through the window of their compartment, then walked away, biting her lip. She did this three times before Neville opened the door with his customary customary shy smile.

"Um… hi," he greeted the girl. "Were you looking for someone?"

"Well, no, not really," she admitted. "I was just on my way back from the loo, and I saw that you had some extra space, and I was wondering if I might be able to move to sit here, because I was trying to read and the girls I was sitting with were very obnoxious, but then I thought I should get my bag first," she lifted the very full muggle knapsack at her feet slightly and dropped it again with a soft _thump_. Victoria noted the rubber-soled muggle trainers and denim trousers extending from under her school robes. _Muggleborn_ , she realized, even as the girl continued to speak. "So I did, but then I thought it might be presumptuous to just show up with everything, so I was going to take it back, but then I thought well, it couldn't be worse to go back to that other compartment than to just ask, could it? So can I sit with you?"

She said all of this very quickly, leaving the four of residents of the compartment blinking in astonishment.

"Um… yes?" Neville answered, budging aside to allow her to enter.

Jimmy moved to help her with her bag, and was obviously shocked when he realized how heavy it was. "Christ on a cracker!" he swore, using one of Dad's favorite exclamations. "What do you have in this thing? Bricks?"

The girl looked somewhat offended. " _Books_ , mostly. All of the school texts, and _Hogwarts, a History_ , and –"

Victoria sniggered, more at the face Susan made trying not to laugh than at the muggleborn girl, but once she looked up, glaring, the Evans witch felt she had to say _something_. "Haven't you got a trunk for those?"

The muggleborn planted her hands on her hips and stuck her nose as far in the air as it would go. "What if I'd wanted to reference them on the way?"

"Why would you?" Jimmy snorted.

Susan chose that moment to interrupt. "Jimmy, Vic, you're being rude, and you haven't even introduced yourselves yet! I'm Susan Bones," she addressed the stranger, whose metaphorical hackles went down slowly.

"Hermione Granger," she offered slightly warily.

Susan grinned encouragingly. "That's my brother, Neville Longbottom," Neville waved awkwardly.

"Um… brother? But…"

"My auntie Amelia adopted us both," the Bones girl explained. "And these two jerks are Jimmy and Victoria Evans. Ignore them; they have no manners."

"Hey!" Victoria objected, as Jimmy said, "Father tried, but Dad thinks etiquette is for squares."

"Squares?" Neville asked.

"Um… boring people?" Victoria tried to explain. "It's a muggle thing, I think."

"It's slang, from when our parents were kids," Hermione Granger offered, taking a seat. "It generally means someone who's rigidly conventional or, well… out of touch with the times, basically."

Jimmy and Victoria exchanged a look, then shrugged. "Yeah. Sounds about right," Victoria agreed.

"Dad uses it for the Traditionalists," Jimmy added.

"And Father, sometimes, when he's being a prat."

"Wait – when James is being a prat, or when Sirius is?" Susan asked with a grin. Neville laughed.

The twins exchanged another look and a shrug. "Both?" "Either?"

Suddenly, Hermione seemed to realize something. She squirmed uncomfortably for a moment before asking, "So, if you two have two… fathers… um. Is that… normal, in the magical world? For, um, two men to be married?"

The twins started sniggering as Neville and Susan exchanged exasperated looks.

"What?" Hermione demanded.

"They're not married," Neville explained.

"They're not even lovers," Susan added.

"Then… how…?"

"Do you want to explain, or should I?" Victoria asked.

"When a mummy and a daddy and a daddy love each other very much…" Jimmy began, before breaking off with a snort of laughter. "Nah. You do it."

"Alright," she said, settling down to look the muggleborn in the eyes. "It's like this: our mum and our dad and our father were all friends back in school, a long time ago. They got together as a triad during the War, which is rare, by the way, but not unheard of, and mum got preggers at Beltane of '79. By both of them. That would be almost impossible any other time, but with the fertility magic in the air… so yeah. We're twins _and_ half-siblings."

"And like, sixth cousins," Jimmy added, entirely unnecessarily.

Hermione looked confused, so Victoria explained: "Dad and Father are cousins. Dad's a Black, and so was Father's mother. But nobody counts sixth cousins."

"I'm just saying, that's why we look alike. 'Cos Father looks like Grandmother Dorea, and she looked like the Blacks."

"Oh. Okay. Fine. Whatever. Point is, Dad and Father are our sires, and they both claimed both of us, which means we're both children of the houses of Black and Potter."

"But you can only have one _father_ , really," the muggleborn objected. "It's – that's how DNA _works_!"

"Oh, we know that," Victoria assured her (though she had no idea what 'DNA' was). "I guess when we get married they'll have to tell everyone who is the blood-heir of which House, but until then it doesn't really matter. We're both Evanses, because the three of them never got married. The way Dad puts it is: he loved Father, Father loved Mother, and Mother didn't love either one of them. Not like that, at least. They broke up after the War ended. Mother left. Dad and Father decided to raise us together. Now, well, Mother never talks about either one of them in her letters. We haven't seen her in _years_. Father hates her, and is still just best friends with Dad. Dad _wishes_ they were lovers, and is apparently on speaking terms with Mother –"

" _Since when_?!" Susan interrupted. Victoria smirked. She was well aware that her best friend considered her family life to be like something out of a trashy novel. She thought Dad's devotion to Father had all the makings of a high tragedy, and would eat up any bit of gossip about their parents with a spoon.

"No idea," Jimmy muttered. "We found out this morning. Apparently she's to meet us at Hogsmeade to un-shrink our trunks for us."

"Wait… what?" Hermione asked.

"Dad shrank our trunks for apparating," Jimmy explained, pulling his out of his pocket and looking at it as though it had betrayed him with its miniature size, "but then we… got caught up, on the platform, and they didn't have time to un-shrink them and stow them for us."

"You must have been cutting it _very_ close!" the muggleborn observed, with a faintly disapproving air.

Neville chuckled. "They're always late for everything."

" _Always_ ," Susan reiterated. "Aunt Amelia says Sirius Black would be late to a meeting with Death himself."

Jimmy laughed. "Explains how he's still alive, then, doesn't it?"

"Does your mother, ah… live in Hogsmeade, then?" Hermione asked.

Victoria shook her head. "No, she lives at Hogwarts. She's the Healing Professor and Head of Slytherin House."

The muggleborn looked intensely curious. "Just ask," Jimmy advised her.

"Oh, well… are you excited? I mean, you said you hadn't seen her in years, and now you're going to be living with her…"

"Excited is…" Victoria began.

"One word for it," Jimmy finished the thought.

"We'd rather not talk about her," Victoria said firmly.

From the look on her face, the muggleborn was well aware that she had touched on a sensitive topic. "Oh. A-Alright. Um. So, you all know each other. Does that mean your families are all magic? Nobody in my family is. My parents were ever so surprised to find out I was a witch. Very pleased, too, of course, but it's not really the expected thing, is it, having the Deputy Head show up on your doorstep to tell you your daughter's been invited to study magic."

The other children nodded and giggled a bit at the idea of Deputy Headmistress McGonagall (the one Victoria's parents referred to as 'Minnie') showing up on any of their doorsteps before Jimmy announced with false pomposity: "You, my dear Miss Granger, have the honor, the _distinct honor_ , I say, of being seated with the last scions of the three _oldest_ wizarding families in Magical Britain. I will have you know that the House of Black traces its magical ancestors all the way back to the first century!"

Neville snorted. "And _I'll_ have you know they can only _prove_ about half of that."

"Ah, but we can make people _believe_ it regardless," Jimmy smirked. "Not that it does much good, really."

"Except for yanking the blood purists' chains," Susan suggested.

"Well, _obviously_ ," the male twin agreed.

His sister ignored her friends' by-play. "Our mum's muggleborn, though," she assured the lost-looking stranger. "So we're half-bloods. And Dad loves Muggle London, so we've spent a fair bit of time with muggles, even though we don't really know much about her family in particular. Nev and Sue are purebloods. All their family have been magic for generations on both sides."

"Not that it really matters," Susan inserted rather sadly. "All our parents and grandparents died in the war. These idiots got off lucky, having _three_ parents survive."

Victoria gaped at the other girl. " _Wow_. Way to be a downer, Sue."

"It's true, though," Susan shrugged.

" _Still_!"

"Whatever."

"Sorry," Victoria offered.

"It's fine. I'm not upset. I'm just saying, we weren't exactly the Weasleys or the Rosiers growing up, you know?"

"Um… no. I really don't," Hermione interrupted, before making a heroic effort to change the subject: "But that means you all grew up around magic, right? Do you know a lot of spells? I'm so worried I'll be behind before we've even started. I mean, I've been memorizing our schoolbooks, and I've tried a few of the easy ones, and they've all worked for me, but…"

The twins and exchanged a look with their friends before breaking out into simultaneous grins. "You could say we know a fair bit," Jimmy began.

Neville interrupted to assure the worried-looking muggleborn that she wouldn't be too far behind in the practical subjects, but then Jimmy cut him off.

"Yeah, but, like, prank spells and the little hexes and jinxes and their counters – they don't put those in schoolbooks."

Hermione looked worried again, but her eyes lit up when Susan said, "We can teach you some, if you want. We still have a couple hours until we get to the school."

After that, the time flew by, until suddenly the sun was setting, and they had only half an hour to go.

That was when Draco Malfoy, prat extraordinaire, decided to darken the twins' compartment doorway.

Most unfortunately for him, he chose to do so as they were practicing _Tarantallegra_ and aiming at the closed door.

He opened it just as Hermione managed her very first proper Dancing Feet Spell.

His two constant companions and lackeys, Vinnie Crabbe and Greg Goyle, caught him before he could hit the floor, but his legs spasmed out from under him as he glared impotently at the five of them.

"Who threw that? Answer me, you – you –"

Poor Draco's swearing skills really were appalling. The Evans twins suspected that it was because he had no proper examples at home.

"Wankers?" Jimmy suggested.

"Twats?" Victoria offered.

"Muggle-loving blood-traitors!"

"I know you _think_ that's an insult, Malfoy," Susan sneered, "but it's really not."

"You… sodding… _bitch_!" the blond growled, his legs still twitching.

"Come, now! There's no need for _vulgarity_ , Draco! What would your dear mummy say?" Jimmy smirked.

"Yes, Malfoy," his sister drawled. "You _know_ how Cousin Cissy feels about any lapse in propriety."

"Is that why you _assaulted_ her on the platform, you… heathen swine?! I can't _believe_ you dared lay a _hand_ on her!"

"You… _touched Lady Malfoy_?" Neville asked, in a tone that suggested 'Lady Malfoy' was interchangeable with 'a flobberworm.' " _Why_?"

"It was just a _hug_ , from one loving cousin to another, Draco," Jimmy defended himself, even as the blond exploded at Neville.

"They wanted to make a scene and embarrass her, of course! You mud-licking traitors are lucky I just found out, or I'd've –"

"You'd've _what_ , Malfoy?" the muggleborn asked, clearly having decided to get in on the fun. "Stood there and twitched at him and sworn incompetently?"

"Shut up, mudblood!" the boy snapped. The four magical children inside the compartment stared at him in shocked silence. Nobody in their world used _that word_ , and _especially_ not to a muggleborn's face.

The pureblood prat was still talking – something about the _real_ wizards were speaking, and she should just hold her tongue – oblivious to the danger as Hermione muttered: "You know, I think shutting up is an _excellent_ idea. What was that spell again? Oh, yes! _Lokum Baglamak!_ "

A ball of yellow light hit the boy in the middle of his chest, and his mouth instantly snapped shut as his teeth stuck themselves together. "MMMMMMM!" he shouted through his clenched jaw as the others broke out into slightly hysterical laughter.

Crabbe and Goyle attempted to advance, but to get through the compartment door, they would have had to drop their still-shaking leader, and they would almost certainly be hexed into jelly first since none of them appeared to have their wands, and everyone in the compartment already had theirs out. After a short, tense stand-off, they muttered: "We'll get you later!" "Yeah, later, mudblood!" and sloped away, dragging Draco with them.

After Hermione was soundly congratulated on her taste in enemies, Susan and Neville changed into their school robes, just in time for the five-minute warning announcement. Susan, Neville, and Hermione tried to assure the increasingly anxious Evans twins that their mother would be there to sort out their trunks and their uniforms, though it did little good.

They flooded off the train with everybody else, lost in a sea of black robes and cloaks. Fortunately, someone had cast an illusion high into the air, spelling out the words 'First Years' with an arrow pointing toward the place they were presumably meant to meet. The five of them linked arms and headed in that direction, only to be ambushed by a very angry – and now armed – Malfoy and company. He had found reinforcements, too: Pansy Parkinson, Tracey Davis, and a rather reluctant-looking Millicent Bulstrode, all of whom the Evans twins recognized from the occasional public confrontation between their parents.

"I've got you now, muggle trash!" he crowed, as Jimmy and Victoria pushed their friends back, and Crabbe and Goyle closed in on them.

"What are you doing?!" Hermione shouted. "They're going to get killed, we have to help!"

The twins exchanged a look. Not likely. "I'll take Goyle," Jimmy whispered.

Victoria nodded, and they squared off against their opponents. The bigger boys, unlike the twins, had no training in any sort of fighting to speak of. There was no way either of the Evanses could take them in a straight-up wrestling match, but they were easy to dodge as they tried to throw punches and grab the arms and robes of the smaller witch and wizard. With a few solid trips and shoves, they stumbled off balance and into each other. Once they were on the ground and tangled up in each other's robes, Jimmy used the Leg-locker Jinx on them, forcing them to pin each other in place as their feet snapped together.

But Malfoy was cleverer than he looked. While his goons distracted the only decent fighters amongst the smaller group of first-years, the girls exchanged jinxes with the out-numbered Bones wards, and he himself focused on Hermione.

"See how _you_ like it! _Tarantallegra! Aspictus! Digitalis Wibbly!_ "

"Leave her alone, Draco! Your problem is with _us_!" Victoria shouted, distracting him long enough to close the distance between them while her brother dealt with the goons and directing her wand at his chest.

But then Parkinson snapped " _Lingula Longorgium!"_ and she felt her tongue begin to lengthen, growing and stretching far too long to allow her to pronounce any spell at all, let alone one that would incapacitate Malfoy.

He smiled cruelly at her and hissed, _"Tsimpísete!_ " sending a bolt of orange light at her. She cringed as it struck, and tried to avoid biting down on her unnaturally long tongue.

"VICA!"

Victoria heard her brother yell, but she was far more concerned with the pain of a thousand stinging, twisting pinches all over her body and more specifically, _stopping_ it.

To that end, she took two steps forward and punched her cousin in the stomach, breaking his concentration. He doubled over, gasping, and she snatched his wand from his hand before sweeping his legs out from under him.

It was about _that_ time that the girl noticed their little scuffle had attracted an audience. A circle had formed around the eleven of them, and the other students were muttering ominously. Everyone except Jimmy seemed to be more or less incapacitated, and Hermione was still whimpering under the effects of Malfoy's Stinging Jinx.

But more importantly, an auburn-haired professor in darkly colored Healer's robes was advancing on them slowly from the direction of the 'First Years' sign. She was clapping sarcastically slowly, and her eyes glowed killing-curse green, showing her anger.

"What. The _hell_. Is going on here?" she bit out, glaring around at all of the shame-faced combatants.

Jimmy looked to Victoria just long enough to see her tongue, extending past her chin, before sweeping his hair back, out of his eyes, and plastering his most charming grin in place. "Wotcha, mum. Aren't you happy to see us?"


	4. Sorting

Lily could not have been in a better mood when she left the castle, half an hour before the train was scheduled to arrive. She landed the little fleet of boats on the Hogsmeade side of the lake and hurried up the steep path to the station. After several minutes pacing the platform, she decided to put up a sign to draw the first years together since she lacked the groundskeeper's stature, and it was already quickly growing dark. That took about half a minute, after which the Stationmaster took pity on her and drew her into conversation. It was mindless small-talk, but far better than nothing.

The flood of students off the train was every bit as chaotic as she recalled from her own days as a student, though she knew objectively that there were far fewer of them this year than there had been back then. She was only expecting thirty-five first-years; her own class had had at least twice as many students.

She waited patiently under her sign, counting noses and matching faces to the names on her list as the first-years separated themselves slowly from the mob of upperclassmen who dallied rather than making their way toward the carriages. They straggled up in ones and twos until their total number reached twenty-three, at which point Lily noticed a few flashes of spell light down near the front of the train, and a suspicious gravitation of students in that direction. Presumably the twelve missing first-years had been caught up in it the excitement as well, Victoria and Jimmy among them.

"Wait here, you lot," she ordered the obedient faction of the first-year class. "I'll be right back." And with that she stalked off to break up the fight and fetch her missing children.

Her good mood fled as soon as she worked her way through the mob around the fight and realized that her missing children – or most of them, at least, had not managed to get caught up in _watching_ , but in the makeshift duel itself.

Not only that, but she seemed to have missed most of the action. She arrived just in time to hear her son scream and see her daughter belt her godson in the stomach and snag his wand out of his hand. _Thank the Powers she didn't snap it_ , Lily thought irrelevantly. She wouldn't have put it past Sirius to teach their children that ending a fight meant destroying any chance that the enemy would regain their weapon, and she most definitely didn't fancy explaining to the Malfoys that their son would need a brand new wand before school even started.

She clapped slowly as she advanced on the scene, enjoying the attention as the older students focused on her approach, but not nearly enough to ameliorate her anger on seeing her children attacked (regardless of the fact that they seemed to have given worse than they got).

"What. The _hell_. Is going on here?" she bit out, holding her temper in check with effort.

It was Jimmy who answered, with a gesture he had almost certainly copied from James and a smirk that was all Sirius. "Wotcha, mum. Aren't you happy to see us?"

Despite everything, she was. But she had to be a responsible adult and teacher, and she had just found them in the middle of a fight, which meant she couldn't say so. Instead, she raised an unimpressed eyebrow at the lot of them. Jimmy wilted slightly, and glared at her.

 _Damn it!_ she thought helplessly. _This is NOT how I wanted this reunion to go!_ But what she said was: "Fun's over. Anyone who's injured or hexed, see me immediately. Second-years and up, head to the carriages, _now_. All other first years, go wait under the sign with the rest of your class. I'll be there shortly to accompany you to the Castle."

The crowd cleared out slowly as she performed assessment spells to determine the hexes used on each student and reversed them. Most of them tried to defend their own actions as they did. It seemed that the muggleborn girl, Hermione, had hexed Draco on the train. The Parkinson girl and her friends had wanted to help him get back at her. According to Susan Bones, she, Neville, and Lily's own children had responded defensively to Draco's ambush, leading to the state of affairs she had witnessed. Draco and his two friends were suspiciously quiet about their role in the fight, which led Lily to believe that there was more to it than she had been told.

She saved Jimmy and Victoria for last, only to find that they were similarly reticent – though that might have been because they didn't know what to say to their estranged mother. If so, that was fair. She didn't know what to say to them, either. She suspected throwing herself on them and crying about how big they'd gotten and how sorry she was that she couldn't be with them while they were growing up, wouldn't really go over well.

Instead, she healed them silently, though she hissed when she realized that Victoria had had a Nerve Tweaking Curse used on her. It was one of the most elementary Dark spells, but a whole different category of maliciousness than the schoolyard hexes all the other students had used. She would have to report it.

 _Fuck_.

She sighed. "Victoria, who cast the Nerve Tweaker on you?"

"The what?"

"Orange curse. The incantation is _tsimpísete_."

" _Oh_ , that one. Malfoy. Does that mean I'm not in trouble for punching him?"

Lily laughed involuntarily at the expression on her daughter's face as she cast a charm to relieve the inevitable residual muscle pain. "No. But it does mean he's going to be in a lot more trouble than you."

" _Good_ ," Jimmy said firmly, with a look that promised additional retribution as well.

"Do try not to get caught," she advised him, and smirked at his double-take.

"How'd you know what I was thinking?"

"Oh, give me _some_ credit: you look just like Sirius when you're plotting revenge. Now, hold still and let me transfigure your robes."

It was the work of minutes to shift the twins' outer robes into identical black student uniforms. Transfiguration had never been Lily's strong suit, so she was sure her alterations would wear off in a matter of hours, but they would hold through the Feast, and this was definitely faster than unshrinking the trunks, having the children actually change, and then re-shrinking them for transport to the Castle, since the elves would already have cleared the luggage from the train. They held _very_ still while the spells took effect – so much so that Lily had to wonder whether Sirius and James had never done this, transfiguration prodigies and show offs that they were.

The kids exchanged a look and a high five before Victoria reminded her that they needed hats.

Lily duplicated her own. "Will this do?"

"Sure." Jimmy plonked his directly onto his head, while Victoria inspected the brim of hers.

"I can't even tell it's a fake!" she exclaimed.

Her mother snorted. "Well, you know what they say: A Healer is just a Charms Mistress with bells on. Come on, Minerva will have my hide if we're late for the Sorting." She ushered her children toward the rest of their class, keeping a sharp eye on Jimmy as he scoped out Malfoy and his comrades – all the Death Eaters' children in this class except the Nott boy, she thought. Victoria was showing off her hat to Susan and Hermione, apparently over the fight.

"All right, everyone!" she announced, making her way around the pack of first-years and counting noses again. All thirty-five were present. "I'm Professor Evans. I teach Healing, so you probably won't have class with me, but I'm looking forward to having at least a few of you in Slytherin House, so let's get to that Sorting, shall we? Follow me!"

The children trailed along behind her, chattering excitedly amongst themselves. There were gasps of delight as they finally had their first view of the Castle, and Lily grinned, and paused for a moment to admire it herself. It really was too easy to forget how beautiful it was, living there day in and day out.

When they reached the boats, she had to break up a quiet but furious argument between Neville Longbottom and her son regarding who would join their sisters in their boat. It seemed that Victoria and Susan had thoroughly adopted the muggleborn girl, and they loudly assured her that she should stay right where she was when she offered to get out of the boat to solve their problem. Neville, too, had already sat down. After a quick scan of the other boats, most of which were already full, Lily sent Jimmy to join Blaise Zabini, Daphne Greengrass and Theo Nott, since the only other alternative was the one with Draco Malfoy and the hulking boys who had to be the sons of Crabbe and Goyle. To be honest, she had never quite figured out which of the brutish Death Eaters was which, so she couldn't guess for the sons, either.

 _They_ got the joy of sharing with _her_ as they floated across the lake, her urgency adding just a little more speed to their passage than usual when she activated the enchantments on the boats.

Perhaps surprisingly, it was not Draco who tried to talk to her first, but the shorter, chunkier of the two whose names she didn't know. "Uh, Professor Evans?" he began hesitantly.

"Yes?"

"You're the Head of Slytherin?"

"Yes."

"And, um… Evans wasn't having us on about you bein' his mum?"

Lily sighed. "No. I really am Jimmy and Victoria's mother."

"Are you mad at us for getting in a fight with them?" the tallest of the three boys asked. "'Cos you should know, we only did 'cos we heard Evans was bothering Draco's mum at King's Cross, an' then that mudblood hexed Draco when we went to talk to them about it."

Somehow, Lily didn't doubt that – at least the first part. Sirius was exactly the sort of irresponsible moron who _would_ get his children involved in continuing the petty familial feud that had been going on between himself and Narcissa since they were five years old.

Instead of immediately addressing that can of worms, she took the offensive. "What's your name?" she asked rather sharply.

"Goyle, Miss. Gregory Goyle."

"Well, Mr. Goyle, I'll let it slide this time, since we're not even to the school yet, but you will very quickly learn that the term ' _mudblood_ ' is _not_ tolerated at Hogwarts. Not only is it considered a breach of the Truce to judge your fellow students based on their blood status, but several of your professors, including myself, are muggleborn or muggle-raised, and we _all_ lived through the War. You would do well to remember that. _All_ of you," she added, with a hard look at Draco, who cringed.

Gregory nodded. "Yes, Miss."

" _Professor_ ," she corrected him again. "Or _ma'am_. I may look like your governess, but as we've established, I _do_ have children of my own. And in answer to your question, I _am_ quite put out with you, but no more so than I am with Victoria and Jimmy, and quite a lot _less_ than I am with Mr. Malfoy."

The boy in question spoke up for the first time since she entered the boat. "But that little hellion _hit_ me!" he objected.

"She hit you to _end_ the fight, _after_ you used a Nerve Tweaking Curse on her. You're lucky she didn't snap your wand."

The boy clutched at the wand in his pocket, but glared at her bravely. "They still started it! And that mud – _muggleborn_ hexed me! She deserved it!"

"With what spell, Mr. Malfoy?" Lily asked coolly. "Are you telling me that a witch who has known about magic for all of a month managed not only to get one over on you, but did so with a spell damaging enough that it warranted an ambush on the platform? And I may remind you, you used the Nerve Tweaker not on Miss Granger, but on Miss Evans, who, according to everyone else, only attempted to defend her friend from your attack!"

He didn't answer, so he must have known that his retaliation was out of line. She wondered if he might even know that spell was banned. She would have to write Narcissa, she realized, suppressing a groan at the thought. It was literally the least she could do, seeing as the infuriating child _was_ her godson. She would have to tell Sirius, too, initiating yet another round of 'which Black cousin is the most insane?' as they went back and forth blaming each other for their children's actions.

"She was sayin' on the platform that Draco wanted to be a werewolf," the boy who must be Vincent Crabbe explained after a moment.

"I never wanted to be a werewolf!" Draco interrupted.

Vincent ignored him. "Those Weasley twins heard, and they told the whole train he _was_ a werewolf."

Lily resisted the urge to massage her temples. "And I suppose it never occurred to you that if you simply ignored such a ridiculous rumor, it would go away as soon as everyone realized you were present and un-transformed on full moons?"

Draco glared at her. "It's a matter of _honor_ – mine _and my mother's_ – Burke said they had their filthy paws all over her! They embarrassed her in front of _everyone_! Maybe _muggleborns_ don't understand, but _some of us_ care about our families' reputations!"

Vincent and Gregory looked aghast, as though they couldn't believe their friend had just insulted a teacher so blatantly, and especially one who was already mad at him.

She gave the boy her most dangerous smile – the one that barred all her teeth, and never reached her eyes. James had once told her it made her look like a shark. Sirius thought it made her look like de Mort, which was the name Old Snakeface had used around the Blacks when Sirius was a kid. He had made her promise not to use it on him because it creeped him out. It seemed to have a similar effect on Draco, who quailed before her. " _Some of us_ know that there are some things more important than reputation. Like _survival_."

It probably made her a bad person that she found the look of horror on the child's face to be faintly amusing, and felt no shame at intimidating an eleven-year-old.

If anyone asked, she would say she had been referring to the fact that defending one's honor by force was a traditionally Gryffindor preoccupation, but in truth, she was thinking more of how her own reputation was a mixed bag after everything she had done to survive the War and its aftermath. Well, that and the fact that one should only defend one's reputation if it would help one survive. She, for example, was more than willing to terrify arrogant little shithead first-years if it meant they wouldn't challenge her authority while she was still trying to establish her hold over Slytherin House.

The remainder of the journey across the lake passed silently, though the three boys started whispering hoarsely to each other as soon as she left the boat. She followed the students up the stairs to the Castle, making sure that none of them fell behind and delaying the moment when she would have to make her excuses for their tardiness to her former Head of House. Not that she and Minerva didn't get along, but they were not nearly the friends they once were, after the Trials, and the Deputy Headmistress hated it when the year started off on the wrong foot.

Sure enough, she was waiting outside the open door when Lily finally approached, and she gave the students only a moment to straighten their uniforms before taking them through to the Sorting. For Lily, she had only a few words: "Go find your seat, Professor Evans. We will talk about this later."

She wished the students good luck before she headed for the high table. Septima was sitting in Lily's usual spot, which meant the only free seat was between Minerva's empty one and the bored-looking Bathsheda. Apparently they would be discussing the delay over dinner. Joy. Well, maybe she could get a few pointers on ward-breaking after Minerva finished reprimanding her: some of the ones the seventh-years had used on their dorms had been painfully arduous to remove for her room checks.

The Deputy Headmistress entered moments later, leading the firsties to stand before the professors, facing their fellow students. Most of them looked at least nervous, though for some their anxiety was tempered by their first sight of the Hall. The muggleborn, for example, was looking up at the ceiling as though it was the most marvelous thing she had ever seen. Lily didn't blame her. It had been the most marvelous thing _she_ had ever seen when she arrived, and she hadn't even known, then, how impressive the enchanting was.

The Sorting Hat introduced itself in song, as usual. Though she had not yet been able to confirm her theory, she suspected that it owed some degree of its personality to the Headmaster of the school, like a dog that resembled its master. Dumbledore's head and shoulders swayed in time to the jaunty tune, and he clapped as loudly as any of the students when it was finished. She often wondered exactly how much of his harmless grandfather façade was only that – certainly some of it was, as she had seen in the war – but she rather suspected that his enjoyment of the little traditions of Hogwarts was entirely genuine.

Down in front of the table, Minerva unrolled the New Student Roll, and called the first name: "Bones, Susan!"

The Sorting Hat was not, as most students believed, simply an enchanted object. It _was_ , of course, enchanted, but the spells served only to animate its fabric and allow the intelligence bound within to express itself. The intelligence itself was called from beyond the mundane plane to accomplish the task of sorting the students of Hogwarts in accordance with the desires of the founders of the school. That was, strictly speaking, its only purpose, though it had, over the years, developed an attachment to the school and its humans, and had taken it upon itself to advise the Headmaster and facilitate a closer connection between those it deemed worthy Heads of each House and the wards of the school.

If one was to ask the Hat who truly ran Hogwarts, its response would have been a smug grin.

But this, the Sorting, was what it lived for (for lack of a better term): Examining the minds of each new child who would become, under the guidance of Hogwarts and her professors, the next link in an unbroken chain of influence stretching back centuries; comparing their youthful desires and beliefs against those of the founders, and judging which of the four would have desired the inclusion of each; comparing each personality to the current Heads' impressions of their houses and finding the best place for each student…

There was nothing like it.

The classes were smaller today than they once were, but each child was still as complex and paradoxically simple as ever.

The first few were easy to sort: Hufflepuff for her sense of fairness; Ravenclaw for his love of knowledge; another Ravenclaw, this one an artist at heart.

The next one might have been a Hufflepuff, with her love of communication, but she lacked the patience and dedication for that house, and so she became the first Gryffindor of the year.

She was followed by the first Slytherin – the Hat made a note to remind the Slytherin that her house was, as always, filled with the survivors as well as the ambitious. The terms of its geas prevented it from being more specific about anything it witnessed in the students' minds, but the Slytherin was clever enough; she would be able to spot the ones who needed more help than most – and moreover, she would give it. The Hat preened silently: sending the Slytherin to Gryffindor was the best decision it had made in several decades, it was sure.

The next child was another Ravenclaw – nearly a Gryffindor, with his bright idealism, and a wide streak of Slytherin slyness, but both were shallow: the Hat was willing to wager that the boy would grow out of them, and into the love of languages and music he hadn't quite recognized yet in himself.

The first real _challenge_ was Vincent Crabbe. He _should_ have been simple to sort: A deceptively calculating mind and a strong desire to distinguish himself from his two closest friends placed him firmly in Slytherin. But he had reservations.

"Well, if you don't want to go to Slytherin, where would you have me put you?" the Hat asked impatiently.

 _I don't know. I just…_ a fear-tainted memory made its way hazily to the surface of the boy's mind: the Slytherin, being deliberately intimidating as she reprimanded three students in a boat.

That was interesting.

The Hat followed the trail of memories back further, examining the details of the encounter. It would be loath to place a student in her care whom she truly despised, for the Slytherin could be vicious when crossed, but it thought she had assimilated enough Gryffindor idealism over the years to maintain her professionalism in most cases.

If the Hat could have snorted, it would have, on realizing the sequence of events. It was convinced that such a minor spat would not unduly influence the judgement of any Head of House, though it was clear the child did not agree.

"I _could_ put you in Hufflepuff," it admitted grudgingly, quickly perusing the child's personality again. The boy recoiled from the thought of that House – with good reason: it had acquired a reputation for ignominy over the past several decades, and he wanted more than anything to stand out. "Well, if you don't want Hufflepuff, it will have to be Slytherin. I assure you, the Slytherin will not hold your actions against you."

 _Are you sure?_ the child thought warily.

"Yes," the Hat said in its most exasperated tone, telling Vincent Crabbe what it knew he wanted to hear. "You're _eleven_. She's an adult, and far too proud to condescend to make your life miserable." Not to mention she was too canny to interfere too much in the lives of the children she had only just gotten back, and persecuting their childish enemies would certainly be that.

 _Okay, then_. A sense of relief accompanied the agreement.

"Don't worry. You truly do belong in SLYTHERIN!"

The next three were easy: a social climbing Slytherin; a sharp-tongued, fearless Gryffindor; and a Ravenclaw whose love of numbers would see him do well in Arithmancy, if the Hat was any judge.

"Evans, James!" the Gryffindor called. The Hat was fairly certain it was not imagining the note of resignation in her tone.

"Ah, what have we he-" it began, but it was cut off by the mental equivalent of a bellowing _WAIT!_

"…Yes?"

 _You have to Sort me with Vica!_ the boy insisted.

The hat sighed. This was a recurring problem with twins. "No, child, I must Sort you where you belong, and your sister where _she_ belongs."

_But…_

The Hat ignored the child's objections as it skimmed through his thoughts. "Clever, cunning mind; adaptable; determined – you are certainly your parents' child, and I see the makings of a good Slytherin here..."

That suggestion raised a whole tangle of half-formed thoughts and emotions, beginning with resignation – clearly the boy had known his most likely house – and running the gamut from fear ( _But Vica won't be a Slytherin!_ ) to reluctance ( _extreme_ discomfort with the idea of being in his mother's House, especially without his sister at his side) to curiosity ( _and all my parents were Gryffindors!_ ).

The Hat chuckled. "That was only my first choice for one of them, and I think you can guess which one."

 _Father_ , the boy thought instantly. _Were Dad and Mum supposed to be Slytherins?_

"Ah, ah, ah. That would be telling."

 _I bet they were,_ the child deduced correctly, taking into account his mother's current job title and father's natal house, along with the Hat's hint. _But wait – they_ weren't _Slytherins – you gave them a choice!_

"I did," the Hat confirmed. "But I will not Sort you to a house you truly do not belong in, and much as I see you would like to join your sister in Godric's House, I have to say, you would make a very poor Gryffindor."

 _You said I was adaptable!_ he argued. _I could learn to be a Gryffindor! I could be brave!_

"Your every thought only makes me believe that Slytherin is the right choice for you, young man. Besides, there is no guarantee that your sister will be in Gryffindor. But perhaps…"

_Perhaps what?!_

"Perhaps Hufflepuff. Helga would approve of your loyalty, and I see no fear of hard work in you. If your sister is the same, she might join you there."

_Yes! Do it! Hufflepuff!_

"Very well, then," the Hat agreed, amusement tinging its tone. "HUFFLEPUFF!"

There was a distinct note of surprise in the Gryffindor's voice as she called the female twin: "Evans, Victoria!"

_Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff_

"Oh, for the love of…"

_Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff_

"I can, and must still evaluate you, you know."

_Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff, Hufflepuff_

"Fine! Loyalty, determination, idealism. You'll make a fine HUFFLEPUFF!"

_Thank you, Hat._

The Hat harrumphed. "Would've made a better Gryffindor, though," it muttered as she lifted it carefully from her head.

She snorted. "Nuh-uh. I _want_ to be a Hufflepuff, with Jimmy. I wouldn't have been a better Gryffindor, because I didn't want to be there."

The Hat could hardly deny that logic as it was passed back to the Gryffindor, who was emanating a mixture of relief and confusion. The Hat could understand that response – truly. It recalled the first-year class of 1971 with great clarity – as well as the trials a certain trio of Gryffindors had presented to their Head of House over the years. The Hufflepuff would probably be cursing the Slytherin and her spawn with in the week, but that was certainly not the Hat's problem.

The next boy was a Gryffindor, craving adventure and excitement, followed by a Ravenclaw with a poet's soul.

The Hat's conversation with Gregory Goyle was strangely reminiscent of Victoria Evans: he wanted to ensure that he was sent to Slytherin alongside his best friend (Vincent Crabbe) and, he presumed, one Draco Malfoy. Thankfully he was decently suited to Slytherin, with deep-rooted ambitions to exceed his family's expectations for him, even if Hufflepuff would have been the Hat's first choice.

And then there was the muggleborn. The Hat was aware that there was only one, this year, and knowing the circumstances of the demographic depression at the end of the War, it had expected her to be a rather weak witch – one of the near-squibs whose accidental magic started small, and only worked up to major events that triggered the alerts in late childhood, rather than at the age of one or two.

It was _not_ expecting a fiercely intelligent, determined mind, and a startling degree of control over her magic. It had probably been a close thing, her setting off the sensors at all, but not for lack of power. It suppressed a wince as it came across the blocked memory of the lapse in control that had finally alerted the magical world to her existence. No – certainly not a near-squib. It made a note to alert the Slytherin about this one as well. She always took an interest in her fellow muggleborns, and this one was more like her than most.

"Well, well, what have we here…" it mused, pondering the mind before it. "I see a great love of knowledge, but an equally great desire to prove yourself, and to do so by making the world a better place. Very idealistic, but at the same time… you are very proud, aren't you. Not without reason, of course, given your intelligence and the work you have done to hone it, but…"

 _Please, just tell me where I belong_ , the child begged.

The Hat snorted. "Well, you have the work ethic of a Hufflepuff, and that house would help you learn humility, certainly."

 _And Susan and Victoria are there, that wouldn't be so bad_. A deep-seated longing for friendship accompanied the thought.

"Don't be too hasty, now," it chided her. "That boldness and tendency to rush into things without thinking them through is all Gryffindor, you know. But Gryffindor would only see you become more stubborn and self-righteous – don't deny it, you know you have a temper, child."

Irritation bloomed, but was quickly reigned in as the girl's more rational conscience insisted that she couldn't decide on a house based on a few hours' friendliness, anyway. _I – fine. Yes, that's true. But-_

"None of that, girl. Now, the Slytherin has made great strides with her House these past years, but old resentments linger. It would be good for the House to have a muggleborn in their midst – I have no doubts you would be able to prove yourself among them, but you would need to be constantly on guard. It would be a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of any first year."

 _I could do it._ A pulse of fiery determination flooded the Hat.

"That was never in question, my dear. The _question_ is, what kind of person would you become under that pressure?"

_I… don't know. Does it matter?_

The Hat scoffed silently. "More than you might think. Which leaves us with Ravenclaw. You thought that the most appropriate house for you before you boarded the train, did you not?"

 _I… did_ , the girl admitted. _But now I'm not sure._

"I am," the Hat chuckled. "Ravenclaw will give you the best chance to grow into the sort of person who can accomplish her goals, regardless of how they may change as you age. And in any case, we both know that you would love learning even if you didn't want to change the world with your knowledge, don't we?" The girl flushed, but nodded slightly in acknowledgment. "Well, then, Hermione Granger, I think we shall put you in _Ravenclaw_!"

The next girl was a clear Slytherin, already well on her way to being groomed for politics at her tender age. She was followed by a slew of Hufflepuffs: the boy who wanted to do his best, whatever that might be; the girl who needed strong friendships to overcome her complete lack of self-worth; a near-Gryffindor who had his mother's quiet courage and devoted nature, and chose to follow her into Helga's house; the boy who had not a shred of deception or bravery or passion in his soul, but a stalwart heart and a bone-deep devotion to his family.

And then there was 'Malfoy, Draco!'

…

After her own children (about whose Sorting she found herself conflicted: amused, pleased, and slightly jealous of Pomona, despite knowing that it was for the best that they not reside in her House) it was Draco Malfoy's House assignment which most interested the Head of Slytherin. She leaned forward as the blond made his way toward the Hat. He had managed to push his way to the front of the line when the students entered, which meant she had a good profile of his face as he made his way back to the center of the Hall. Under a thin façade of confidence, she thought he looked nervous: his swaggering stride was just a bit too hasty, and his expression was closer to 'pensieve' than 'self-assured.'

It was no surprise at all that the minutes ticked by as he sat under the Hat – or at least not to Lily.

"Thought he'd've been a shoo-in for one of yours," Bathsheda muttered as her mental count neared 150 seconds.

"He reminds me more of Sirius as a child than Narcissa," Lily murmured back, though this meant little to the aged Runes professor, who had begun teaching after she and her cohort had graduated.

…

"So let me get this straight," the Hat repeated testily. "You don't want Slytherin because you don't like the Head of House, and you don't want Gryffindor because _it's Gryffindor_ , and you're not suited to Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff it is, then!"

 _NO! The Evans twins are in Hufflepuff!_ Draco complained, the underlying emotion more concerned with the fact that he would have no chance to form a strong following among children who were more concerned with fairness and equality than family and money than any real problem with the Evans twins. _Why can't I just have Ravenclaw?! I like reading._

"You like excelling, which is not the same thing. _At all_. You are not suited to Ravenclaw. You _are_ suited to Slytherin. Or Gryffindor."

A thrill of fear and disgust filled the boy at the suggestion of these houses, neither emotion disconnected from either House: he simply could not stand the idea of bowing to a muggleborn Head of Slytherin, especially one he was convinced had threatened his life as they were crossing the lake, and he was nearly as terrified of his reception in Gryffindor, among the children of his parents' enemies, as he was disgusted with the House and its reputation for noble idealism. _Please_ , the boy thought desperately, _can't you just_ –

"No," the Hat said firmly, considering the founders themselves and what they would have wanted. On the whole. "Gryffindor," it decided. Salazar would have approved of the child learning to deal with his enemies from a position of weakness, and Godric would have thought that the experience would build character. Plus, ironically, the Hat suspected that dealing with his fellow Gryffindors would teach the boy patience and cunning far better than Slytherin, given the makeup of each house at present.

_But!_

"GRYFFINDOR!" it shouted for the hall to hear. The boy sat frozen in shock beneath the Hat's brim as the increasingly hungry students gave a polite smattering of applause.

"You _can't_ ," the boy hissed. "I'm a _Malfoy_! I can't be in _Gryffindor_!"

"You can and you will," the Gryffindor said quietly, lifting the Hat from the boy's head. "The Hat is never wrong. Now go join your housemates."

"But –"

"Go!"

"My father will –"

"I will write him myself if you delay this Sorting another second, Mr. Malfoy! Go!"

He went. The Hat chortled to itself: making such a scene over not _wanting_ to be sorted into his new house was not going to do the boy any favors with his new housemates. Perhaps he was even less Slytherin than the Hat had thought…

…

Up at the high table, Lily failed to completely suppress a snigger.

"Were you expecting that?" Bathsheda asked shrewdly.

"I wasn't _not_ expecting it," she admitted, applauding as the boy concluded his quiet argument with the Deputy Head and dragged his heels toward the Gryffindor table.

The Runes mistress sniffed. " _Slytherins_ ," she scoffed. "Always have to act like you know everything."

"Not _everything_ ," Lily smirked. "Just the _important_ things."

"Oh, hush, girl," the older witch chided as Leanne Malone was sorted into Hufflepuff and Lilian Moon took her place.

…

The Hat chuckled to itself as it sorted a hardworking, honest girl into Hufflepuff and debated whether the next girl would do better in Slytherin or Gryffindor. Slytherin, it decided, would better teach her to curb her impulsiveness and harness her manipulative tendencies. The next boy was a Slytherin, too, with a bone-deep _need_ to gain enough power to someday overrule his father's control of his life. He was followed by a girl who was terrified of the idea that she might _not_ go to Slytherin – _If Draco could be a Gryffindor, anyone could be_. Fortunately for her, her willingness to do whatever she had to in order to prove that she was more than just the future socialite her parents expected was sufficiently Slytherin to give her the house she desired.

The short streak of Slytherins was followed by another pair of twins, who, unlike the Slytherin's children, were more than willing to be separated. The first was a near-perfect Ravenclaw – independent and open-minded, but entirely concerned with her studies, while the second was far bolder and altogether Gryffindor.

The sorting moved quickly (inventive Ravenclaw, a near-Hufflepuff Gryffindor who was determined to fight for social justice, a near-Slytherin who wanted to reach his goals by Hufflepuff methods, the muggle-raised Gryffindor who thought Magical Britain was the best adventure he had ever imagined, the Ravenclaw whose quiet, studious façade hid a fantastic inner life and a desire to write) until the Hat reached the penultimate student.

"Ah, now… where to put _you_ ," the Hat muttered.

 _Gryffindor, obviously! All my family are Gryffindors!_ The boy was shaken, however, recalling the sorting of Draco Malfoy not half an hour before. All the Malfoys, after all, were Slytherins. Everyone knew that.

"Slytherin could give you an outlet for that desire to succeed, to be better than your brothers, to stand out…" the Hat wheedled.

 _No, I can't! It has to be Gryffindor_ , he thought fearfully.

The Hat was inclined to think that dealing with Slytherin might teach the boy bravery, much as dealing with the Gryffindors would teach the Malfoy boy cunning, but then… The Slytherins, of course, would establish a new pecking order quickly with the loss of Malfoy, and the student currently being sorted, with no money and no real idea of how to pursue his ambitions, would almost certainly be at the bottom, resentful and marginalized. As a Gryffindor, however, he would be an even more immediate foil for the Malfoy boy, and perhaps learn something of nobility and honor in turn, if the constant challenge did not turn him into a headstrong fool.

"I suppose there is a certain… naïve boldness to you," it allowed after considering this. "And I have sorted children for less, in the hopes that they might live up to the values of their house, rather than down to them."

 _Does that mean I'm a Gryffindor?!_ the boy wondered desperately.

"If you truly want it, then, yes, I suppose you can be a _Gryffindor_!"

The Hat doubted that decision only until it was set upon the head of the final child, an altogether too-collected boy who had been trained from the cradle to ruthlessness. He was not quite so cold-hearted about it as his mother had been and had no ambition to speak of, but there was no other place to put him but Slytherin, and if the Hat was any judge at all, placing the Weasley boy in the same house as the Zabini would have resulted in an even more explosive conflict of temperaments than between the Weasley and the Malfoy. At least, it thought as it shouted " _Slytherin_ ," neither the Malfoy nor the Weasley were likely to murder each other outright. The Zabini, well…

It let out a self-satisfied little hum of approval as the last child thanked it and moved away, pleased to have another sorting so successfully accomplished.


	5. Dinner Conversations

It was a _highly_ irritated Minerva who had come to join Lily at the High Table after the sorting was complete. She glared in freezing silence until the Headmaster concluded his opening remarks, then hissed, " _What did you do?"_

Lily helped herself to a roasted chicken breast. "I'm sure I haven't the foggiest idea what you're talking about."

"You were _late_ , and Draco Malfoy is in my house!"

"It's not _my_ fault Draco sorted into Gryffindor," Lily smirked. "And we were late because I had to break up a fight on the platform."

The Deputy Head's nostrils flared, her lips pressing into a very thin line. "A fight? Between whom?"

"I'm not going to tell you that, Minerva," the Head of Slytherin said as calmly as possible. "They weren't on school grounds, yet, and the school year hadn't begun, so it's of no consequence to you."

"You know as well as I do that the school year begins as soon as that train leaves the station! It was one of your Slytherins, wasn't it?" the Deputy Head asked suspiciously.

Lily smirked again. "I think you'll find that students from all Houses were involved. But that's really neither here nor there."

" _Malfoy_ ," the older woman muttered, apparently giving up on the topic of the fight for the moment. No doubt she would ask her prefects and get the whole story from them after dinner, or at breakfast.

"What _about_ him?"

"Why did his sorting take so long?"

"Well, obviously he wasn't inclined to go into the house he was best suited for," Lily offered reasonably.

"I don't think he _is_ best suited for my house! I knew his parents, you know, and –"

" _Minerva_ ," Lily said sharply, finally turning to look at her nominal superior. "Don't tell me you're going about judging children on the actions and personalities of their _parents_. Look at Jimmy and Victoria – neither of the boys nor I were in Hufflepuff, as I _trust_ you well remember."

The older witch snorted. "Only too well. I still think I've dodged a bullet on that one," she huffed.

The Head of Slytherin rolled her eyes. She probably had, but that wasn't the point. "The Hat would not have put Draco in Gryffindor if he didn't have the potential to belong in Gryffindor."

"And what would you know about it, missy?" Minerva scoffed.

Lily hesitated at that, but only for a moment. "You don't really think Gryffindor was its first choice for _me_ , do you?" She could still hear its voice echoing in her ears, from all those years ago: _Ah, I know exactly where you belong… but the house would ruin you, you know. Gryffindor, on the other hand… well, Godric would approve of your fire. Whether Salazar would approve depends, I suppose, on what you make of it…_

The Deputy Head's eyes hardened, as she was reminded of the extent to which Lily had deceived her in the years leading up to the end of the war. "No, I don't suppose I do, at that. Which reminds me, what was the Head of Slytherin doing, fetching students to the castle rather than preparing her dorms for their arrival?"

Lily sighed. It wasn't as though Minerva truly had much power over her. _Technically_ Lily, like all the professors and staff, reported to Minerva as the Deputy Head, but in practice, there was very little the Head of Gryffindor could do to discipline her former prefect. She lived at Hogwarts because her keeper lived at Hogwarts, she taught because she needed something to fill her days (other than dealing with the students' mischief) and wanted to remain in Dumbledore's good graces – it wasn't as though she was _paid_ – and her duties already included whatever miscellaneous rubbish the other professors didn't want to deal with. Most often, the older witch was forced to settle for variously public degrees of tongue lashing when Lily stepped out of line. Fortunately, it would only help her position within Slytherin that the Head of Gryffindor was very publicly put out with her at the moment.

Still, it was very irritating to be lectured in front of her peers as though she was still a child in Minerva's house. She sighed, holding her tongue and reminding herself that it was only a matter of time until the older witch ran out of steam. In the meanwhile, most of the others would sympathize with Lily, who had only wanted to see her children in person, and had acted perfectly professionally as she went to fetch them. The more Minerva ranted, the more unreasonable she would seem.

Truly, the sad part was, Lily wasn't even _trying_ to undermine her authority, but she was fairly certain most of the staff respected her at least as much as Minerva, and Dumbledore clearly relied on her more out of the two of them. It would be amusing to see if she could oust the older woman from her position entirely, she mused before she caught herself. _Bad Lily_ , she reprimanded herself with the slightest smirk. _Minerva is almost as much of an institution as Albus, and you_ know _you don't want the paperwork that comes with her job…_

"Sorry, what?" she asked absently, realizing that the witch in question had paused in her irritated tirade. "Yes, it was very wrong of me to be late to the sorting due to problems entirely beyond my control," she took a stab at addressing the argument she hadn't been paying the slightest attention to. Judging by Bathsheda's snort of half-suppressed laughter and Minerva's thinning lips, she had missed it by a good margin. "Erm… and also that your term has got off to a rubbish start?" Nope. "Listen, Minnie," she said finally, resorting to channeling Sirius. "You can whinge at me as much as you like, but that doesn't change the fact that I did not step outside the boundaries of professionalism in fetching the children, breaking up the fight, or dealing with the aftermath. Draco's sorting is neither my fault nor my problem, and throwing a strop won't change it. So act like a bloody adult and _deal with it_." She ignored the sputtering, incoherent response, instead turning her entire body toward the Runes Mistress. "Bathsheda, I was wondering if you might have any insights on wardbreaking…"

…

Down at the Hufflepuff table, a small knot of students watched this conversation avidly – with far more attention, in fact, than one of its participants.

"You don't think we got her in trouble, do you?" Victoria asked anxiously as the Deputy Headmistress glared at their mother.

"Nah," Jimmy assured her. "She doesn't look worried."

"She's a Slytherin, she could be hiding it." Victoria nodded; Susan clearly shared her concerns.

"No, I don't think so." Neville, on the other hand, almost always backed Jimmy's opinions. "That's the same look Vicky gives people when she wants them to think she's paying attention, but really isn't."

"Hey!" Victoria objected, but Susan giggled.

Jimmy did a double take, looking from his sister to his mother and back. "He's _right_."

"Of course I am. And look, she's talking to that other professor, now."

"Yeah, but Minnie still looks peeved," Victoria noted.

"It's _fine_ , sis. She's a grown woman. She can take care of herself."

"I know that, but…"

"C'mon, Vic, lighten up," Susan cajoled her, evidently reassured by the boys' arguments and Lily's ending hers up at the high table. "Talk to people, make some friends."

"Speaking of, what happened to Hermione?" Neville asked suddenly.

"She's over at Ravenclaw, down at the far end," Jimmy pointed.

The others turned to peer at the bushy brown head: she appeared to be talking animatedly to several of her new housemates. "I hope we have classes together," Victoria sighed. Aside from Susan, she didn't have any close female friends, and she had _liked_ the excitable Ravenclaw, especially once they had gotten past the awkward introductions.

"I'm sure we will," Jimmy said reasonably.

"And even if we don't, we'll still have loads of free time," Susan pointed out. "I'm sure we can find some time to spend with her."

"Who's that?" an older Hufflepuff asked, apparently noting that nearly half of the new Hufflepuffs were staring at the Ravenclaw table.

"A girl we met on the train," Victoria explained.

"And she got sorted into Ravenclaw? Tough luck," the girl said, making a face. "Still, your friend is right, you'll have plenty time to spend with friends from other Houses outside of class. Speaking of which, I'm Jan. I'm one of the third-year mentors, so I expect I'll be seeing a lot of you this term."

The firsties introduced themselves before Jimmy asked, "Mentors?"

"Sure!" Jan grinned. "We pair off with the new cubs and help you all get your bearings the first few weeks, and answer questions and such for as long as you need. Of course, you shouldn't be shy about asking anyone for help, not just _your_ mentor, but mostly third and fourth years are the best bet. Sometimes it's like the upper years have forgotten how completely overwhelming Hogwarts can be at first."

Neville and Susan did not look surprised. Apparently their aunt Amelia had told them more about Hufflepuff than either of the twins had thought to ask. Victoria, however, thought that sounded brilliant. Dad and Father had never mentioned anything similar in Gryffindor, and for all they had suspected that Jimmy was bound for Slytherin, they hadn't exactly had any Slytherin adults around to ask about the inner workings of that House.

"What are the dorms like?" Susan asked excitedly.

The older student laughed. "Well, you'll see after dinner, but…"


End file.
